Download of the Week

I don't care much for the video, and this isn't really my kind of music, but I dig this song nonetheless. I think it has something to do with those short, punctuated guitar riffs. It's catchy.

Rilo Kiley - Silver Lining

Too Good Not To Share

I Knew Him Well, Horatio

I'm reeling over the death of one of my literary idols, David Foster Wallace. Dead at 46, an apparent suicide. I run hot and cold, angry at him for leaving us too soon with too little (by my count, 2 novels [3, if you consider one is large enough to count twice], 2 short story collections, 2 non-fiction collections), sad that he's gone, happy that I got to know him prehumously through his writing.

Everything I've read from the man has inspired me to be a better writer. True, the big one, Infinite Jest, sits atop my interminable stack as one that I have not, yet, finished. I will one day, when I'm ready. Maybe I'll take a week or two vacation from work to do nothing by that. Perhaps that's what I need.

He could string a sentence together in such a way that I would get mad at myself for not thinking of it first. He mixed wit and pathos in such a way that it was hip and postmodern at the same time. He wrote the best essay on the porn industry that I... let me stop there. I never knew someone *could* write a good essay on the porn industry.

There will be no more from DFW. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is. Let the mourning commence.

8 years, 22 days

Zadie Smith On Writing

That Crafty Feeling

A lecture given by the English Author, Zadie Smith, to the students of Columbia University's Writing Program in New York on Monday March 24, 2008

DISCUSSED: Fraudulence and Fraudulent Idiots, Kafka, Macro Planners and Micro Managers, Obsessive Perspective Disorder (OPD), Gravity's Rainbow, Derrida, Nabokov, Dostoyevsky, Crap, The Literary Echo Chamber, Apprenticeship, Magical Thinking, Victorian Boilers, Scaffolding, The Bhagavad-Gita, Donald Rumsfeld, Zeno, Roman Palazzos,Character, Odradek, Proofs, Smart Strangers, The Waste Land, Ezra Pound, Nausea

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I've been meaning to write about this wonderful article for a few months now, but I knew I needed more time than the usual 15-30 minutes I normally allow for a blog entry. This was published in the fifty-fourth issue of The Believer, June 2008.* This article is for writers, aspiring or otherwise. If this describes you in anyway at all, stick with me.

Smith starts off by apologizing in advance for attempting to write about (or, in this case, talk about, since it was originally a lecture) something that cannot really be discussed amongst outsiders without feeling like a fraud, since talking about fiction - the why - is one thing, but talking about the art of fiction - the how - is another thing altogether.

"Permit me," she says, "the language of a fiction writer. The language a writer uses with another writer, when both are in the middle of novels and they meet downtown for coffee and speak to each other across the table from their separate dreams. I'm not sure how helpful it will be, but at least I won't feel I'm putting anything over anybody."

She then launches into her discussion, divided into ten parts. I'll briefly describe them here.

1. OPD in the First Twenty Pages - wherein she talks about two different kinds of writers, Macro Planners (who obsessively build the plot and characters in his/her novel before even writing a single word, often exchanging ideas, endings, verb tenses, etc., with the shuffle of some index cards) and Micro Managers (who simply start writing and let one sentence build upon another). Smith confesses that she is the latter and has developed an Obsessive Perspective Disorder (OPD) over the first twenty pages, because they determine the outcome of the rest of the novel. "In the case of On Beauty my OPD spun completely out of control: I reworked those first twenty pages for almost two years." When she finally got them worked out, she says, the rest of the novel took only five months.

2. Other People's Words, Part One - wherein she talks about the inspiration of other writers - other people's words - and how you leave them behind as you evolve, how you inevitably leave your previous self behind, how your own words, those you wrote in the past, become themselves other people's words. "After each book is done, I look forward to hating it (and I never have to wait long); I get a weird, inverse confidence from feeling destroyed, because being destroyed, having to start again, means I have space in front of me, somewhere to go."

3. Other People's Words, Part Two - wherein she discusses some writers who won't read anything else while they are writing for fear of being tainted by another's voice vs. writers like herself who devour other books (but not crap, she says, not in the first hundred pages anyway) to give balance to her diet. "If my sentences are baggy, too baroque, I cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage." "The truth is," she goes on to say, "It's a very strong writer indeed who gets by without a model kept somewhere in mind."

4. Middle-Of-The-Novel Magical Thinking - wherein she discusses the middle of the novel, that point not necessarily mid-stream but where it stops being work and the words start flowing, where you lose sight of real life altogether, and the magic that seems to happen there: you find things happening around you that seem to fall in perfect symmetry with what you're writing. All writers have stories about middle-of-the-novel magic. She tells one of hers.

5. Dismantling the Scaffolding - wherein she discusses literary scaffolding, a device writers use to build their novels (she uses, as examples, modeling each chapter on the books of the Old Testament or the speeches of Donald Rumsfeld) and advises to use that scaffolding when you're writing but don't forget to tear it down later because you'll invariably find you didn't need it at all and the book may be better without it.

6. First Twenty Pages, Redux - wherein she advises that, late in the novel, you go back and revisit the first twenty pages and loosen it up a little, give your reader the benefit of the doubt. You don't need to explain absolutely everything up front, she says. "This reader who, for all you know, has read Thomas Berthard, Finnegans Wake, Gertrude Stein, Georges Perec - yet you're worried that if you don't mention Sarah Malone is a social worker with a dead father in the first three pages this reader might not be able to follow you exactly."

7. The Last Day - wherein she describes the exhilaration of the four-and-a-half hours following the completion of a novel, when you're finally done.

8. Step Away from the vehicle - wherein she gives her most important piece of advice, to step away from your novel when you're done, put it in a drawer ("a year or more is ideal - but even three months will do") and then take another look. The secret to editing, she says, is "you need to become its reader instead of its writer." This is true. Being an aspiring writer for these past eighteen years, myself, I have had ample opportunity to write something and then put it away for years on end, only to reopen it again and check it out from a whole new perspective. In my case, sadly, the realization that usually hits me is that my writing is crap. (Trust me on this one. The stories I could tell you, the stories I could show you...)

9. The Unbearable Cruelty of Proofs - wherein she describes proofs as "the wasteland where the dream of your novel dies and cold reality asserts itself." Proofs, those loose-leaf pages marked up by an editor's pen, might be a nightmare for the established writer who's next novel is already stimulating the salivary glands of publishing houses both here and abroad, but frankly getting to that point is still a pipe dream for me, so I can't really relate to this section of her lecture.

10. Years Later: Nausea, Surprise, and Feeling OK - wherein she talks about picking up your already-published novel years later, how sometimes it induces nausea, sometimes it surprises you, and sometimes it leaves you feeling "OK."

If this has prompted you to race out to your local bookstore or library and see if they have last month's copy of The Believer (the latest is the July/August Music CD issue), great.** If not, then let's move along. For me, I felt as if we were talking about some of my own writing, some of my failed attempts, and some of my own habits (bad or otherwise). It has been stimulating, reading this article now for the fifth time, and even as wear out the binding in the magazine, I know I'll be reading it again in the near and distant future.


* If you've never heard about this magazine, it's worth checking out. I have all fifty-five issues on the shelf across the room from where I'm sitting right now. I read it from cover to cover as soon as I get it (though, I will admit, since I know K is reading this, that I usually skim the more political articles).

** You can read most of the introduction here. But the rest you'll have to find yourself.

Two Quickies

Pardon my meager sense of humor, but these gave me a couple of laughs:

A snail was mugged by two turtles. When the police asked him what happened, he replied: "I don't know. It all happened so fast."

(pause for the odd snicker)

A priest, a rabbi and a lesbian walk into a bar. The bartender says: "Wait a minute... is this a joke?"

Why Didn't Anybody Tell Me?

I'm not sure too many people in the western world noticed, but Alexander Solzhenitsyn died yesterday. It was buried in the news (pardon the pun), and I accidentally stumbled upon it. A day late I might add. Who was he? Check out the link, below, for some more information, but if you'd really like to dig in, check out the Russian Literature section of your local library wherein you'll find the three more important authors that country has seen in the past 200 years: start with Fyodor Dostoyevsky, work your way up to Anton Chekov, and cap it off with a little Solzhenitsyn, in that chronological order.

I can't explain why, but I went through a Russian Lit. phase in college. It started with Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov during a standard "Great Books" class, required of Literature majors. I stumbled into Chekov during some drama courses, Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard among his best. And then, on my own, I sought out Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward. Not at all a light read, it took me months to get through it, and it only started to make sense afterward when a professor of mine explained that it was an allegory for the Russian communistic state.

These days I'm not reading nearly such heady stuff, but I feel the loss of one of the last of the three Russian greats as if I'd been reading them still. I may have to dig back through the stacks and rediscover. Although, I think I'll start with some short stories.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, December 11, 1918 – August 3, 2008

I Can Fly

I watched Superhero Movie the other day. Really not a great movie, which should mean a lot coming from me because I really like spoof movies. Just not this one. Sure, there were moments that made me laugh out loud, but overall... well, I've seen better. (The genre itself doesn't require much critique. It is what it is.)

However, there was one scene in the movie that cracked me up beyond all others and literally had me on the floor. Luckily YouTube has it for me to share. Enjoy.

Watchmen Fans: Geek Out

Someone over at Rotten Tomatoes with waaaaay too much time on his hands put together a scene-by-scene analysis of the Watchmen trailer. When I saw it, I rolled my eyes and chuckled, but then I read it and it got me salivating for the movie even more. If you're also a curious fan, check it out here. This guy noticed a few things that I certainly did not.

Download of the Week

The Saturday Knights - Foreign Affair

Really a bizarre song. Rap? Yeah. But not terribly serious. I can't catch all the lyrics, but any song that raps about Amy Winehouse, Lily Allen, and M.I.A. - and is called Foreign Affair - has got my interest. Honestly, I heard this the first time and, while I liked the beat, had a strong WTF? thought running through my head. The second time I just liked the beat.

Couldn't find it on YouTube, but here's a link to an mp3. Grab it while it still works.